Editorials

Contracts and corruption

Many of the roads that were new less than a year ago, are already in various states of atrophy. Come monsoon and they will be all but washed away. What a shame this is. The question that would not have escaped anybody at this moment is, why cannot Manipur ever build a road that can last out even a single monsoon? The answer to this question too would be obvious, but like so many other things in Manipur, the abnormal has become the normal, and people have been so desensitized that they do not see these aberrations as anything worth protesting or making the effort to set things right. Something must be done to get the people to wake up and find the courage to declare all that are abnormal as abnormal. It is no point playing the blame game either to shift responsibility for these failings to other governments, and this should also mean, there is equally no point for any government to claiming credit that they are doing better than other governments in this matter. Nothing much has changed in all these years. Just as a leopard cannot change its spots, people in power will always remain fallible to corruption, and indeed the story behind the sorry conditions of these so called all-weather roads that cannot take a single monsoon, is official corruption. All the road thus washed away so easily, were obviously built not to specifications. If this is not what the cause is, then it would have to mean sheer laziness or incompetence of our engineering departments. This an age when road connectivity has been made possible under the sea through tunnels. All of us would have read reports of how all major islands in Japan for instance are road-linked through such tunnels. Roads have been also built in other much more adverse weather and topographical conditions than Manipur, so there can be absolutely no excuse our roads are so prone to the vagaries of monsoon.

If experience over the decades is anything to go by, there is hardly a point in taking an idealistic position that people generally have a predilection to be good, and therefore only sermons would be enough to make people change their ways. This is especially so with those in power, after all, power is known to corrupt and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. As James Madison, one of the founding fathers of the American constitution once said, men are not angels therefore there must be caution in entrusting unchecked power to any man or manmade institution. The remedy therefore must be in introducing checks and balances in the system so as not to allow these men in power to stray out of prescribed courses of governance.

This remedial measure would apply to all spheres of governmental activities, but since our immediate concern is poor road building and the corruption involved in the activity, we will restrict this discussion to just road building. The question is how can compliance to contract specifications be ensured in road building works? What checks and balances mechanism can be best suited in this scenario. The suggestion we have made many times before is to introduce complete transparency. As for instance, whenever there are roads to be constructed or repaired, make the contract terms public. As for instance, if a certain stretch of road has to be blacktopped, let it be known which contractor has won the tender for the job, which engineer is involved in evolving its specifications, what are the specifications, and what cost would be etc. If publicising these information through the mass media is a little too far-fetched, at least they should be uploaded on the internet for anybody to access. In matters of village roads, we would even suggested putting up billboards along the roads under construction, highlighting some of the salient features of these contracts. Let the people know what they were supposed to get and thus be able to draw up a balance sheet of what they received and what they should have received. It is however unlikely anybody in power, including the current team in the drivers’ seats will listen, precisely because they would all be benefitting from not being too strict in minding these government contract jobs. When even scams that have been exposed, including the purchase of flimsy belts for the police that tear like paper, the award of contract for developing custom accounting software for the government to relatives of those awarding the tenders, the CC TV purchase scam, and not the least, the stealthy withdrawal of a huge amount of money from an “exhausted” government account to clear bills for government contractors of dubious records etc., are being swept under the carpet, what more can be expected.

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